Automated Maintainability of TTCN-3 Test Suites Based on Guideline Checking

Similar to software development, the test development must be accompanied with a set of rules specifying how to write tests. They are grouped together into a document called guideline. Guidelines are especially necessary for large test specifications involving many developers and have the goal to reduce the effort of the overall development. So far, no universal guidelines for the TTCN-3 language [1] have been defined. Instead, each company or team defines and follows own development rules for test structuring and development. This paper deals with the problem of how to automate the validation whether a TTCN-3 test specification complies or not with an established guideline, i.e. guideline checking. The results of the validation process are a list of non-consistencies. A follow up step is the refactoring which automatically proposes and applies changes to improve the test suite compliance level, and thus its quality.